5 Basic Parts of Your Wardrobe That Were Once Considered Outrageous

5 Pants

If you’ve seen drawings of the Ancient Greeks, you know none of them were big fans of trousers. They wore tunics, which came in their own styles over the centuries, including long tunics called “chitoniskos” and shorter ones called “exomis.”

But this wasn’t because trousers hadn’t been invented yet. Greeks knew of neighboring peoples who wore trousers, such as the Xiongnu nomads. But Greek men rejected the invention, calling trousers effeminate. In art, they sometimes portrayed mythical Amazons as wearing trousers — not because these warriors were masculine but because they were feminine. 

Exactly why any clothing becomes gendered is always going to be arbitrary, but we can imagine why someone might consider tunics appropriate for men, while trousers are fit only for women. Clearly, any garment that conforms tightly to the body’s shape right up to the crotch doesn’t work if you have big swinging genitals hanging between your legs. That’s especially true if you live in the warm Mediterranean and need airflow cooling you off. 

In fact, when Greek men wore tunics (“chitons”), these garments were short and often allowed passersby a peek at those sweaty genitals. Women’s chitons were longer. Trousers therefore seemed too modest to Greek men, and modesty was a quality they associated with both women and barbarians. Only in an uncivilized society would men feel the need to cover up. 

4 Underpants

Like we said, plenty of ancient people wore trousers, even if the Ancient Greeks didn’t. By medieval times, people also found some utility in wearing a shorter pair of trousers under their regular trousers, so they wouldn’t need to launder the main ones as often. These underpants were called “braies” and covered quite a bit more of the leg than modern men’s underwear. 

Those were just for men. Women wore no underpants during this era. Bifurcated garments on the lower body were considered too masculine for women to wear. You know about the old assumption that trousers are only for men, right (an assumption the Ancient Greeks strongly disputed)? If it’s inappropriately masculine to slide your legs through individual leg holes for outer garments, the same could be considered doubly true for underwear. 

Instead, under their skirts, women would wear just a petticoat or a chemise. For those wondering about hygiene, they had menstrual rags back then, and you don’t need underpants to hold those in place, though they could probably help. 

We should mention a competing theory here, which says women did wear underpants in the Middle Ages, but they simply left no historical record of this, maybe due to a massive cover-up. For example, here’s a woodcut from 1473, showing women wearing some sort of underwear that aren’t chemises and also look smaller than braies.

However, these are the handmaidens of Queen Semiramis of the Assyrians, and this woodcut portrays her as a deviant. The stories said she dressed as a boy, and that’s her in the bed, having sex with her son. 

3 Bras

When you heard just now about “braies,” in the context of underwear, some of you surely thought about bras. The two words are very loosely related, in that both concern limbs. Braies comes from other words for pants (this root also led to “breeches”), while brassiere comes from a French military word for arm guards. Even today, bras is French for “arm.”

People wore proto-bras before the 20th century, including both in the Middle Ages and Ancient Greece. But if we zip to the early 20th century, we reach an era where most women instead wore corsets under their dresses. Then a New Yorker named Caresse Crosby invented the modern bra, not because corsets are so uncomfortable but because the corset she was going to wear to a ball happened to poke out from under her dress. 

Some people loved her invention from day one. But it didn’t displace corsets right away, because other people figured it failed at the main thing corsets do: shaping the torso. Sure, this new “backless brassiere” supported the breasts, but if it didn’t hold in the waist, what was the point? Why not just abandon underwear altogether?

Crosby got a patent for the bra in 1914. World War I started that same year, and later into the war, the government clamped down on corsets. The nation needed that steel for the war effort, they said, and by hobbling the corset industry, they convinced women to give the bra a try. The government went on to estimate that killing corsets saved 28,000 tons of steel, enough to build two battleships. That sounds completely unbelievable, but when you multiply tens of millions of women by the couple of pounds that each corset weighed, the math checks out. 

It also helped that the war gave women a chance to ditch corsets aside from any materials mandate. They worked in factories, where a constricting corset made labor impossible, and this revealed how much more comfortable the alternative could be. Plus, when the war was done, a bunch of men came home with modern ideas about what sort of underwear they wanted their wives wearing, thanks to encounters they refused to discuss involving mysterious French women. 

2 T-Shirts

Now that we’ve talked a bit about underwear, let’s inform you that the most common sort of clothing you’ll see on people was itself originally considered underwear. It’s the T-shirt, which people might still use as innerwear today, and there was a time when it was exclusively considered underwear for men. In Havana, for example, it was illegal in the 1890s for men to wear these shirts in public, under a law that banned all underwear-like tops. 

To understand why a T-shirt was considered so inappropriate, imagine that men instead wore a skintight single layer of cotton over their lower body instead of their upper body. That might raise a few objections. (We do have yoga pants now, but they’re not considered appropriate attire for all genders in all settings.)

The T-shirt began as the top half of such a garment, which covered both the upper and lower body. It was called a union suit, and it clearly did not look like something fit for a man to wear in the streets.

The key feature here wasn’t the long sleeves or the buttons, which wouldn’t survive the transition to T-shirts, but rather the stretchy material, which was very comfortable. At the start of the 20th century, underwear companies sold these stretchy shirts, separated from the pants, as “bachelor undershirts.” The Navy issued them as underwear, too, because they dry so fast. Then, starting in the 1920s, people saw the benefit of just wearing them in any casual setting.

The 1920s were also when they first got the name “T-shirt.” F. Scott Fitzgerald came up with the name in his book This Side of Paradise. It refers to how the shirt is shaped like a T, if you hold the sleeves out. Though, considering that nearly all shirts are also shaped like T’s if you hold the sleeves out, that’s a pretty dumb name. A T-shirt looks less like a T than other shirts, given how short the sleeves can get. And that doesn’t even touch upon the utter T-lessness that is a sleeveless tee.

1 Shoes

People have been wearing shoes for around 10,000 years or so. But we’d like to focus now on one aspect of shoes, which just so happens to cover every shoe you own: the way you have one dedicated shoe for your left foot and a different one for your right foot.

When the shoes are mirror images of each other, but are not interchangeable, we say the shoes are “chiral.” The alternative is for each shoe to be symmetrical, and that was the standard for shoes from the 16th century right up to the 19th century. A few people were rich enough to get custom shoes made for each foot at a tailor. Everyone else wore “straights,” a pair of shoes where each could be worn on either foot. 

With some people, these straights would gradually mold to each foot’s unique shape. After years of wear, the shoes became chiral. Other people made it a point to switch the shoes between their feet every day. This ensured they wore out the two shoes evenly, much like rotating a car’s tires. 

Of course, chiral shoes fit you better. But for those three centuries, symmetrical shoes seemed the obvious choice. They were easier to make, and were cheaper as a result.  

How would you react if, one day, you learn that all pairs of new socks are going to be designed so one only fits the left foot and the other only fits the right? And that they’re charging you more for the result? You’ll conclude that they’re cheating you, of course. You’ll probably decide to be a terrorist. 

Or a nudist, which is probably for the best. 

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